by David A. Bell

I've been reading Daniel Golden's superbly reported and wonderfully entertaining new book The Price of Admission, which has a well-deserved blurb from OU's Alan Wolfe on the back cover. Golden shows, in depressingly convincing detail, the extent to which it is possible for wealthy parents to buy their children's way into universities like Harvard with large donations. He also details the advantages enjoyed by the children of celebrities, faculty children, and other privileged groups in the increasingly ferocious elite university admissions game. So brazen has the pursuit of advantage become, Golden recounts, that since he began writing on the subject in The Wall Street Journal, grasping parents have sought him out as an expert on just how much money it will take to ensure their progeny's admission to the Ivy League! The book left me horrified--and also somewhat guilt-ridden, given that I went to the university where my father taught. On second thought, though, I wonder why I feel so horrified. Despite everything Golden reveals, college admissions today remain far more meritocratic than they were fifty years ago, when elite prep schools like Exeter routinely sent a large majority of their largely WASP students to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Human nature being what it is, a totally meritocratic system is probably impossible to establish--especially in a country where elite universities depend so heavily on private donations. As Captain Reynaud might put it: "I'm shocked! shocked! to find elites reproducing themselves here." Furthermore, admission to the Ivy League arguably matters much less today than it did fifty years ago. American universities as a whole have, in most respects, gotten much better over this period. Scores of them can boast the sort of large, well-trained faculties and extensive, luxurious facilities that were once the province of a small handful. These schools in turn feed into a much larger, more diverse economy. Going to an Ivy League school matters a lot in some specific fields (such as, cough cough, the sort of elite journalism represented by TNR), but much less in many others. OK, this is self-serving. I teach at one of these much-improved non-Ivy places (Johns Hopkins). But it's still true. The reason I feel so horrified, I think, is that things were not supposed to turn out this way. The privileged parents depicted in Golden's book belong to a new American elite that came into being as a result of well-known social changes in the mid-twentieth century, which were accompanied and justified by an ideology of meritocracy. But skip ahead to 2006, and the beneficiaries of these changes, their wealth prodigiously swollen by the inegalitarian expansion of the past two decades, are not acting like meritocrats at all. They are acting--horrors!--in their own selfish interest, and in a broader sense, in their class interest. And is it entirely a surprise that the anger against their unfair advantages and their hypocrisy bubbles most fiercely on the edges of this new class itself? Among the professions that recruit heavily from elite universities, but pay too little to allow their members to promote their own children in the way Golden's big-time donors promote theirs? That is to say, in such fields as publishing and journalism and academia? Is that why I'm feeling so particularly horrified and conflicted? Am I worried about my own kids (college classes of 2017 and 2020), and praying that their own "legacy" and "fac-brat" status will give them enough of a boost in the admissions game to offset their parents' inability to make six-figure donations? Nah. Couldn't be.